40 Fun Facts About Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram sent his students onto the New York subway in the 1970s to ask strangers for what?

Their seat was all they asked for, with no reason given, and about two-thirds of riders stood up or slid over. The idea came from his mother-in-law, who asked why the young no longer stood up for the elderly.

Stanley Milgram's small-world study, passing folders between strangers by mail, is tied to which famous phrase?

Six degrees of separation is a phrase Milgram himself never used. John Guare's 1990 play made it famous, long after the folders reached their target through about five go-betweens.

Which future psychologist was Stanley Milgram's classmate at James Monroe High School in New York?

Philip Zimbardo and Milgram were classmates at James Monroe High School. Each grew up to run one of the most notorious studies in psychology, a decade apart.

Which Star Trek actor played a professor modeled on Stanley Milgram in the 1976 television film The Tenth Level?

William Shatner starred as the Milgram-like scientist, with Milgram paid $5,000 as a consultant. Milgram had little say in the script and found the finished film dull.

To gauge public attitudes without asking anyone, Stanley Milgram left what in public places for strangers to find?

Stamped letters addressed to different groups were planted around town, and Milgram counted how many strangers mailed them. Most made it to a research institute; most addressed to a pro-Nazi group did not.

Stanley Milgram's small-world research helped inspire a pastime linking any film performer to which actor?

Kevin Bacon is the hub of a challenge in which players connect any actor to him through shared films. Its name borrows the catchphrase that grew out of Milgram's chains of acquaintances.

What name did Stanley Milgram give to a person you recognize from your daily commute but have never spoken to?

Familiar stranger was his term after students photographed commuters on station platforms and returned a week later with the pictures. Almost nine in ten riders picked out someone they had never spoken to.

Which former Genesis member put a song about Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments on his album So?

Peter Gabriel dedicated the song to the volunteers who refused to obey. He first performed it in 1980 but left it off two albums before it finally surfaced six years later.

Stanley Milgram, who staged his own experiments on the unsuspecting, was a fan of which American television series?

Candid Camera, Allen Funt's hidden-camera show, began on radio in 1947 as The Candid Microphone. Milgram shared his admiration for it with an old classmate who went on to run the Stanford prison experiment.

A 2010 French TV documentary restaged Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment disguised as what kind of program?

A game show called La Zone Xtrême was the cover, with contestants told to punish another player's wrong answers. Only 16 of the 80 quit before reaching the harshest penalty.

Stanley Milgram, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in 1933 in which borough of New York City?

The Bronx was his first home, and after the war relatives who had survived Nazi concentration camps came to stay with the family there. His bar mitzvah speech in 1946 was about the plight of Europe's Jews.

What trade did Stanley Milgram's immigrant father Samuel follow, running a shop his mother later took over?

A baker known for his cakes, Samuel Milgram gave the family a modest living. He died in 1953, while Stanley was still an undergraduate, and Stanley's mother kept the business going.

Which subject did Stanley Milgram major in at Queens College, where he never took a single psychology course?

Political science was his degree, and Harvard first turned him down for lacking any psychology. He crammed six courses at three New York colleges in a single summer to catch up.

Stanley Milgram died in 1984 at just 51 from his fifth episode of which sudden health emergency?

A heart attack, his fifth, killed him while he was still a working professor in New York. He left behind unpublished research on people who speak words fed to them by radio.

Stanley Milgram began his obedience experiments in 1961, months after which Nazi official went on trial in Jerusalem?

Adolf Eichmann was hanged four days after Milgram tested his last volunteer. Milgram wanted to know whether ordinary people would hurt someone simply because someone in charge told them to.

Stanley Milgram's findings are often tied to 'the banality of evil', a phrase coined by which German-born thinker?

Hannah Arendt coined it while reporting on a Nazi official's trial for The New Yorker. Her claim that ordinary people following orders can do great harm is what Milgram's laboratory seemed to confirm.

Which future Grease star had an uncredited part as a student in The Tenth Level, a TV drama based on Stanley Milgram?

John Travolta played one of the students, unbilled, a year before Saturday Night Fever. Big sponsors including IBM and General Motors refused to back the drama, which delayed its broadcast for months.

Who played Stanley Milgram in Experimenter, the 2015 film in which the psychologist speaks directly to the audience?

Peter Sarsgaard took the role for director Michael Almereyda, who borrowed the fourth-wall device from Milgram himself. Milgram addressed viewers that way in the films he made about his research.

Which Stranger Things actress played Stanley Milgram's wife Sasha in the 2015 biographical film Experimenter?

Winona Ryder played Alexandra Milgram, known as Sasha, whom he met at a Manhattan party in 1961. The real Sasha Milgram makes a cameo in the film's final scene.

What did Harvard decline to give Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, prompting his move to a New York university?

Tenure was withheld partly because colleagues felt uneasy about the man behind the obedience studies. He left in 1967 for a full professorship, skipping the associate rank entirely.

Which school activity did the teenage Stanley Milgram later draw on to make his obedience experiments so convincing?

Stagecraft for plays was his job on school productions, and the same theatrical touch made his laboratory dramas gripping. He also edited the Science Observer, a school newspaper.

Which Harvard personality psychologist, the mentor Stanley Milgram valued most, chaired his doctoral dissertation?

Gordon Allport handled Milgram's admission and became the most important person in his academic life. He let doctoral students chase their own ideas instead of hitching them to his projects.

Stanley Milgram was a research assistant to which psychologist, famous for experiments on group conformity?

Solomon Asch showed that people will deny what they plainly see in order to agree with a group. Milgram considered him his chief scientific influence and set out to test social pressure with higher stakes.

For his doctorate, Stanley Milgram compared how readily people conformed in France and which Scandinavian country?

Norway proved the more conforming of the two, with the French readier to defy the group. Milgram tested almost 400 people, using taped voices to stand in for a unanimous majority.

Stanley Milgram announced his small-world findings in 1967 in the very first issue of which magazine?

Psychology Today launched in May 1967 carrying his article, and the publicity made the study famous. The more rigorous academic version did not appear until two years later.

Which professional body held up Stanley Milgram's membership for a year over the ethics of his obedience research?

American Psychological Association officials put his application on hold in 1962, before he had published a word of the research. An investigation went his way and he was admitted.

What was the top marking on the fake generator in Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, reached by most volunteers?

450 volts was the final switch, and 26 of the first 40 men pressed it. Experts Milgram polled beforehand had predicted that almost nobody would go that far.

What term did Stanley Milgram coin for the mindset of seeing yourself as a mere instrument of someone else's wishes?

The agentic state was his explanation for why decent people obeyed. Once volunteers felt like tools of the experimenter, they no longer saw themselves as responsible for their own actions.

Stanley Milgram's ideas on obedience were later used to explain which massacre by American soldiers?

My Lai, where American troops killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers in 1968, was read through his work on military authority and on how seeing an enemy as less than human loosens restraint.

Which US government agency gave grant support to Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments at Yale in the early 1960s?

National Science Foundation money paid for the formal series, which began in the summer of 1961. Milgram had already run pilot versions with his own students in his first semester.

For a study of unwritten social rules, what did Stanley Milgram's graduate students do at railroad ticket counters?

Cut into the line is exactly what they did, at 129 queues around New York. The students found it so nerve-racking that some felt nauseated before they could make themselves barge in.

Stanley Milgram argued that city dwellers ignore the people around them as a defense against which mental strain?

Information overload was his answer: a city presents more faces than anyone can deal with, so people learn to recognize others without engaging. His article in Science helped launch the psychology of urban life.

Which British illusionist restaged Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment to screen volunteers for a fake robbery?

Derren Brown ran it in his 2006 Channel 4 special The Heist, telling participants it was unfilmed university research. How far they went helped decide who got the chance to hold up a security van.

In Stanley Milgram's best-known small-world study, every folder was meant to reach a Boston man in which profession?

A stockbroker was the target. Most chains never arrived at all, because somewhere along the way a person failed to pass the folder on.

Stanley Milgram's 'cyranoids', people voicing words fed to them by radio, honor a hero of which French playwright?

Edmond Rostand wrote Cyrano de Bergerac, in which a gifted poet supplies love speeches for a handsome but tongue-tied cadet. Listeners in Milgram's trials never guessed the words were someone else's.

In a 'cyranoid' trial, Stanley Milgram used a hidden radio to feed clever answers to which group being interviewed?

Schoolchildren aged 11 and 12 gave strikingly sophisticated replies that were really Milgram's own. The panels of teachers questioning them never suspected, and judged each youngster on words that came from a professor.

For a study of TV and antisocial behavior, Stanley Milgram had a special episode made of which CBS hospital drama?

Medical Center filmed a special ending showing a theft, and viewers were later given their own chance to steal or to give to charity. Watching made no measurable difference to what they did.

The generator from Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments is kept in a psychology archive in which Ohio city?

Akron is where the Archives of the History of American Psychology look after the machine. From 1992 it spent several years on the road in a traveling psychology exhibit.

The first published criticism of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments was a 1963 newspaper editorial from which city?

St. Louis was the unlikely source: the Post-Dispatch scolded Milgram and Yale for the stress put on volunteers. A local psychologist tipped Milgram off, and the paper went on to print his rebuttal.

Decades before Stanley Milgram's small-world study, which Hungarian author wrote a short story proposing the same idea?

Frigyes Karinthy floated it in his 1929 story Chains, which dares readers to name anyone on Earth who cannot be reached through five acquaintances. Milgram's folders tested the notion for real.